Family Leaves Grandmother In ER To Take Vacation

An elderly woman spent more than a week in a Halifax emergency room because her family refused to take her home, according to the chief of Nova Scotia’s largest ER. Dr. Samuel Campbell said the woman was not ill, but her grandchildren were looking after her and felt they could no longer cope with her mild dementia. Campbell said Halifax Infirmary emergency room staff contacted her next of kin —

the woman’s children, who were in Florida at the time — but they became angry that she couldn’t stay in emergency and refused to take her home. The staff were threatened with legal action or with bringing the issue to the media. “The family was just saying, ‘We refuse to take her home. She’s your problem. Do something’,” said Campbell in an interview on Thursday. “Nurses are crying and social workers are desperate.” CONTINUE

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3 Comments

AnnieBornAgain
on June 12, 2016 at 2:28 am

Heart breaking, I can understand if they were stressed and needed help, as caring for someone with dementia is Not an easy situation.
But when did people get so heartless ;(
This story brings tears to my eye, myself now i am 35 and have my parents getting older at 68 and 71, my 68year old mother is not in the best of health and need alot of help my father is getting on and i try my best to care for them, but always feel like i am failing them as i am disabled myself after a stroke at 30..
There is not alot of help out there but there is NO way on Gods Green earth i would dump either of them in a hospital to take a “holiday” I also know that if I had to ask my nieces/nephews for there help for me to have a break they would care for there grandparents with all the love and support in the world.
We need to raise children with a sense of family because without it they learn to care for no one or nothing except there own needs and what makes them “happy” in the moment.

I could very easily write an extensive volume about this as my father needed 24/7 care at home for 22+ years. I know first hand how situations like this not only take a toll on family, the expense, lack of services, medical professionals, etc. I am not condoning what happened in the least, but before everyone hates on this family let’s realize that this family is in crisis, needs help for the grandmother, and those who take care of her. The article is written by someone who does not know the challenges that they face daily, the hospital staff did not keep her out of kindness but because of legal ramifications, and they chose to kept her in the emergency room. I hope that family gets the help and resources, support they need for everyone involved. The hospital should have realized this but they wanted to publicly shame these people rather than offer real support.

Thanks ‘Bumble Bee”, you have hit the nail on the head. This is about how our health system is set up. Families who try to get their elder into a higher level of care are beset by a number of roadblocks and ‘disqualifications’ that end up making the caregivers desperate. In Canada, the only way to get ‘the system’ to take you seriously and move your case along, is to leave your loved-one in the hospital and then they’ll ‘fast-track’ you. Otherwise, you are on a ‘wait-list’, and you are ignored. This happened to us—being on a list for more than a year, while we struggled as a family to care for our Mom. They basically ‘forget’ about you unless the elder has had a medical emergency, and because you are taking up a critical care bed in the hospital, they need to hurry your placement along. And if you opt to take your loved-one back home from there to wait on your placement in a long-term care facility, you’ll go back to waiting forever. There’s no motivation for them to help you faster unless there’s a hospital bed to be freed up. Sad to say, but true. And I feel so sorry for that family and their desperation. I can perceive that in order for their difficulty to be resolved, they had to ‘go away’ and be unreachable by the ‘system’, so that help could be attained. The system sets people up to create this monstrosity.